Jay-Z, Kanye bring Watch the Throne tour to Tacoma tonight

Tonight will be the highlight of Tacoma’s pop music year. That’s when Jay-Z and Kanye West wheel their epic Watch the Throne tour into town.

It is a testament to the size of these personalities and their combined tour that Jay-Z is using it as a springboard for becoming the first solo hip-hop artist to perform in New York’s Carnegie Hall. Those February shows, which will cost concert-goers a minimum of $500, will serve as a fundraiser for his own Shawn Carter Scholarship Foundation as well as the United Way of New York City.

That’s on top of the fact that the “Watch the Throne” album and its singles are landing on nearly every Top 10 music list of 2011. That album muses on fatherhood, black-on-black crime, and how the fortunes of two hip-hop bigshots fit in the context of the African-American struggle.

And then there’s just the idea of seeing these two hip-hop titans performing together. Jay-Z, born and raised in Brooklyn, and West, reared in Chicago, have worked together for more than a decade, first when the Midwesterner was an upstart producer and the New Yorker had established himself not only as Jay-Z, but also as Jigga, Hova and a host of other monikers that have since become shorthand for lyrical genius. West soon broke out on his own, and has since become one of the most important (and controversial) voices on the pop music scene.

If that’s enough to make you wish you had planned to see the concert, here’s the good news: There are still tickets available at face value – $60 to $220 – at ticketmaster.com.

If it’s not, take a look inside Sunday’s opening performance at Los Angeles’ Staples Center, the first of three shows there. Randall Roberts of the Los Angeles Times was there: “The grand and epic show featured more than three dozen songs, a testament to the vitality not only of two of the most magnetic rappers to ever make the music, but also of hip-hop as a cultural force whose intricate constructions have served as the musical blueprint of a generation. With each rhyme, the stack of verbiage piled higher, and thousands of people recited every word to every verse like Baptists at a Bible retreat.

“Black cards, black cars/Black-on-black, black broads/Whole lotta money in a black bag/Black strap, you know what that’s for?” wondered Jay-Z during a heavy-as-a-boulder version of “Who Gon Stop Me.”

West offered back-up in the form of a taunt worthy of Cassius Clay: “Who gon stop me, huh?,” repeating it twice before moving into a remarkable – but unprintable – 16 bars delivered in Pig Latin.

There is a lot of ego between these two guys, and at times it took two stages to contain them both. The show was constructed as a tag-team song swap on a grand scale, with the two lobbing verses at each other. With each memorable line, hook, beat and rhyme, their impact on American musical culture grew larger: “99 Problems,” “Jesus Walks,” “Hard Knock Life,” “Gold Digger,” “All of the Lights,” “Izzo,” “Public Service Announcement,” “Diamonds From Sierra Leone,” “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” – they played them all (at least portions of them all) and dozens more, and combined them with a grand display of equally enormous proportions – requisite fireballs included.

Two massive projection screens pumped images of the pair performing on the stage below, close-ups of a menacing West, sweat dotting his face, his eyes squinting, silver grills on his bottom teeth that sparkled when he sneered. He also wore a leather kilt and leggings that lesser men could never pull off.

Jay-Z, Yankees cap pulled down low on his head, walked across the stage with casual confidence, grabbing his crotch while perfectly crafted rhymes flowed effortlessly out of his mouth.

In addition to projecting the rappers’ every movement, the screens behind them also ran shots of predatory animals: Lions, sharks, bears, hawks, black panthers, tigers, cougars were all shown prowling their habitats menacingly. At one point, a large cat chased down an antelope, caught it and killed it while the rappers walked the stage below.

Despite the concert’s length (it lasted about 21/2 hours), this was a Cliffs Notes version of their work, consisting of bits and pieces of their tracks from throughout the pair’s careers, both as solo artists and as longtime collaborators.